Sunday, July 6, 2014

I'm getting fast on the focusing,. These flowers don't have much nectar of pollen so the bees move fast.

Zoom in & see her tongue in the tiny flower! I think it is Redshank or ladies thumb. Persicaria maculosa.

This would have been a perfect shot if that blue flower hadn't been in the way. :-)

Enlarge, look closely, and you can see a 1mm hitchhiker that hopped onto her. I think it's a thrip.

Here's an enlargement:

I love the colors in this one.

Skunks vs Daisy: Skunk-3 Dog-0 Me-two!

The second one let out a squirt on the inside of the blanket I covered the trap with, but I escaped un-odored.

No doubt there are several more.
The blue flower is probably batchelors button. (Wild chicory doesn’t have as many petals.)

The red-pink clusters with the splotch on the leaves. Macroscopic flowers: knotweed, smart weed, Redshank or ladies thumb. Persicaria maculosa

Each flower on the persicaria is no bigger than the size of one of the
honey bee’s eyes. That fact gets lost when the perspective is enlarged in the
macro photo. This fools me when I look at some of these photos and I lose the
sense of the proper scale of how small those flowers actually are. They were
hard to photograph. I had to hand hold with manual focus aperture priority &
they only were on each individual flower for a fraction of a second. Each good
clear shot well framed & in focus that I got, took at least 15 or 20 crappy
ones to get it. I need more practice & I’ll get quicker.

Those were all part of a packet of “friendly insect”
seeds somebody gave us a couple of years ago. Except for the knot weed which
came with the alpaca shit. At least the bees like it.

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Some years ago I was asked to etch a portrait of each of the Gemini astronauts on both a curved beveled piece of glass that was awarded to each of them, as well as on heavy 1/2" glass disks that were installed at the exhibit featuring each astronaut at the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame® This was a break from the usual church work. I was invited to attend their induction and meet them. The fact that they each went home with something I made is kind of cool.